I felt like I was starting from zero when I first became a product manager. I was an effective project manager but didn’t have any formal product management training or experience. I had been learning the product process through working with my team but hadn’t read much about the theoretical underpinnings of the role. When I was promoted into product management, I didn’t want to squander the opportunity I had been given. I began to consume as much material as I could find.

One great thing about product management is that many seasoned PMs readily share their experiences and best practices. This wealth of resources not only educated me on the best ideas for effective software development, it also helped me form my own approach. While you can’t become a great PM just by reading about it, you can recognize and avoid many mistakes by learning from others.

As a companion to last week’s post, I want to share my catalogue of the reading material I have relied upon to evolve my thinking on product management. I hope this list can be helpful to someone new to product management or interested in becoming a product manager.

Book List

This list isn’t specifically dedicated to topics on product management and software development. Rather, it is more a list of books that shaped my own personal style of thinking, communicating, and collaborating.

The Big Three

1. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
2. The Communication Catalyst by Mickey Connolly & Richard Rianoshek
3. The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

The Core List

1. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
2. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you by Rob Fitzpatrick
3. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr
4. The Art of Agile Development by James Shore & Shane Warden
5. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
6. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
7. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
8. Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson
9. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
10. The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future, by Steve Case
11. The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to Scalable, High-Growth Business by David S. Rose
12. The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky
13. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

What I Still Need to Read

1. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, by Nir Eyal
2. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen
3. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
5. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
6. Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers

Articles and Blog Posts

The Concept of a Product Manager

• A hitchhiker’s guide to product management
• Top 1% of product managers
• New to working in Product? Here’s some recommended reading
• MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager
• The First Principles of Product Management
• Dear PMs, It’s Time to Rethink Agile at Enterprise Startups
• Relentlessly Resourceful
• Digital Transformation and Product Management
• Be a Balanced Product Leader, Not a Feature Broker or Product Dictator
• Product Manager vs. Product Owner
• What is Product Management? ( I use this framework for my outline)
• Product Management’s Most Important Lessons
• How to Master The Discipline of Product Management (Not the job of Product Manager)
• What People Don’t Tell You About Product Management
• Managing and Developing Product Managers
• Product’s Job: Do the Right Things

Strategy and Market Research

• Do Things that Don’t Scale (market segmentation, value proposition)
• Creating effective customer feedback loops for product teams (Collecting insights)
• Selling Vs. Learning (validation techniques)
• Hearing About Accounts, Listening for Segments (problem interviews)
• Talking Directly with (Real) Customers (observations)
• Your Job is Not to Make Every Possible Customer Happy (MVPs)

Vision and Leadership

• Deadlines (vision and goal setting)
• Agile Teams: Don’t use happiness metrics, measure Team Morale (relationship building)
• Negotiation Skills for Product Managers: 5 Things You Need to Know (negotiation and decision making)
• Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write (communication)
• Start your product initiatives with a kick-off document (communication)

Product Lifecycle Management

• Lifecycle stages and product performance
  • The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don’t Consider
  • How to Work with Engineers
  • The Time Value of Shipping
  • Product Leadership in Scrum
  • 4 Daily Scrum Tips for Product Owners
  • Sprint Review Tips for Product Owners
  • Twitter: thoughts on logical mistakes that are made in product dev.
• Product Market Fit
  • 12 Things about Product-Market Fit
  • How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit

User Experience and Product Backlog

• User Interactions, visual design, user stories, NFRs
  • How to Work with Designers
  • How would you design an interface for a 1000 floor elevator?
  • 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories
  • Let’s Abandon Customers and Users
  • 10 Usability Heuristics Every Designer Should Know
• Prioritization techniques
  • Using The Kano Model To Prioritize Product Development
  • Ruthless Prioritization
  • Making Unanimous Product Decisions
  • Epics, Stories, Themes, and Initiatives
• Validation techniques incl. demo , usability test, solution interview, A/B tests
  • Best practices for User Testing
  • When to Run Bandit Tests Instead of A/B/n Tests
• Backlog changes (grooming)
  • Prioritising the Product Backlog
  • The Product Roadmap and the Product Backlog
  • The Difference Between a Flat Product Backlog and a User Story Map
  • Mastering your product backlog
  • Product Backlog Refinement
  • Organizing a Large Product Backlog
  • From Idea to Product: Start with creating the product backlog

Product Roadmap and Metrics

• The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data
• The GO Product Roadmap
• 10 Tips on How to Choose the Right Key Performance Indicators
• Data Analysis Tips for Product Managers and Product Owners
• Choosing the Right Planning Horizon for Your Product
• Four Steps to Creating a Strategy-Based Roadmap: Why Starting with Visions Matters
• What is the key SaaS metric that every SaaS Company should obsess about?

Business Model and Financials

• Why Product People Should Care About Business Strategy (business goal selection & prioritization)
• How To: Business Model Canvas Explained (business model description)
• Effective financial projections for a startup (financial forecasting and business case creation)

Hope this was helpful! – Kutter